Documentary Animation// Evaluation

Documentary animation hasn't been an area of animation I have ever considered to venture into as a an area of personal interest perviously, however for this module I was tasked with the challenge to select an over all theme in order to produce that theme within a documentary format with animation; the theme I choice was 'Family'. I worked with Malachi Lawrence who was responsible for the environmental design and background work and James Beardsell who was responsible for editing, directing and also animated on the project. Originally I was attracted to working with James because his idea of documenting his experiences with the death of his father I found very touching and honest; knowing James for quite a while now, I wanted to help him create such a piece to remember his father by. We were inspired by simplistic animations with honest reflective interviews to create our animation as well as naive artists such as José Rodríguez Fuster and ivan generalic.

For this project I worked as a concept artist, character designer, visual script writer, colour director and animator. Originally our group was only going to animate James own experiences with losing his father to cancer, however after being suggested by tutors to add another voice to our documentary I gave my own experiences to the project. At the time I was discovering elements of my parents divorce that I wasn’t aware of and as a result, I began feeling uncomfortable working within the project however continued with the idea. I also was given more roles within the project then originally agreed, as my concepts for our animation were preferred over Malachis character designs by our director James. When working on the animating aspects of this project I struggled to maintain the work schedule set, I wasn’t told if backgrounds were completed in order for me to start animating the scene with correctly placed and sized characters or that they were even available to me. I also struggled when referring to the animatic, because James didn’t adapt the animatic to our second recording of narrative and as a result the animatic didn’t follow the narrative particularly well at times. 

The final animation, as well as the final version of our narrative, was edited together by James, who also added subtitles to our animation. We kept in contact with content with a google Drive, where I’d upload the finish animation scenes in order for James to then segment them with his own animated scenes. I also created an animation tutorial for James, when using the textured brush neither of us had used before. When animating to the animatic I struggled, as the narrative did not match up with the shots and much of the segments of my narrative were accompanied with a blank screen. I also had to create my own backgrounds for certain scenes at the last minute because neither James or Malachi informed me that the backgrounds were complete. I’m not very happy with the final animation, however I do like how our unique approaches to art have blended semi-together. The visual storytelling within the scenes I animated I feel I created and expanded from the animatic I was given to the biggest of my capabilities as an animator in the project. Looking back at the project, I would of liked the animatic and storyboard to me more informative to animators than it was. I feel like the communication within the group, considering we have both a digital folder for everyones work and several online chats, was poor and as a result the final animation looks sloppy. In my opinion.  I did enjoy working with Malachi as his illustrations are very refined and his visual concepts are something entirely new to my own creative tastes. As a director I feel like James worked more as an editor and animator than what a directors aim is within a project and the title of director was shared with the three of us creatively. I haven’t enjoyed working within a group on this project because the tasks I were asked to complete were always very vague, which gave me a lot of creative freedom but felt more like I was working independently then on a group project.

I'm personally very pleased with the character designs I developed for this project, from concept art to final character design sheets. My idea to represent our narratives with animals, based on the themes presented to us within our interviews such as descriptions and environments I’m over all pleased with and feel like they work much better then any humanoid characters I could of designed. I’ve animated in a similar way to this project perviously, last year on a project. Where I animated with segments of colour rather than flat outlines. Strangely, although I find the method stressful and time consuming I do really enjoy this animation method of animating colour and shape, rather than line. As a result, I’m also interested to use more textured brushes in to come animation projects, like the animations I produced in this project rather then clean and bold outlines that seem to me as being very ‘traditional’.  I’ll return to the animation I've created for this project and finish my own backgrounds for each segment; so I can use the clips I want for my showreel for this year, as I did for a few segments of animation in the final cut of the animation.